no permission to install to directory

Question

[sooni]

Hello. I am a graduate student, and I am trying to analyze using R server through the infrastructure server provided by my school.

When I try to install an R package, an error occurs: ‘Error: ERROR: no permission to install to directory ‘/usr/lib/R/library’’. Does anyone know why this error occurs?

One more thing: R is also installed on the laptop I use.

Thank you for your help!

[GenoMax]

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Answer 1

[LChart]

currently your R is using the global binary (probably in /usr/bin/R), which will attempt by default to install libraries into /usr/lib/R/library. These directories are generally not modifiable except under very rare circumstances.

The .libPaths function (https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/base/versions/3.6.2/topics/libPaths) allows you to change where R looks for and installs packages, e.g., if you set

dir.create("/home/sooni/Rlib")
.libPaths("/home/sooni/Rlib")

will use the local Rlib directory (that you just made) to build and install packages. More generally from the documentation:

The library search path is initialized at startup from the environment variable R_LIBS

so using

export R_LIBS=/home/sooni/Rlib

before running R will instruct R to use your local directory (note that /home/sooni/Rlib must actually exist for this to work).